Leadership, democracy and the civil rights movement

Southern Illinoisan, January 21, 2014

 The recent deaths of T.J. Jemison and Franklin McCain offer several important lessons on the nature of American democracy. Neither man was a household name.  That's the first lesson. 

             Throughout American history, true democratic reform rarely originates in the halls of Congress or the courts.  Instead it much more typically begins in the streets, churches, workplaces or campuses when ordinary people like Jemison and McCain display extraordinary courage.

            Jemison, who died November 15, was minister at Mt. Zion Baptist Church in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where he led the first bus boycott of the civil rights movement in 1953, more than two years before the more famous Montgomery bus boycott.

As throughout the South, buses in Baton Rouge were segregated, with black passengers seated in the back and whites in the front. Black passengers complained of frequent mistreatment by the all-white staff of bus drivers. As Jemison explained, “The Negro passenger had been molested and insulted and intimidated and all Negroes at that time were tired of segregation and mistreatment and injustice.”

            Realizing that blacks made up more than two-thirds of the city’s bus riders, Baton Rouge’s black leadership saw the economic vulnerability of the bus company. Thus in June 1953 they called for a boycott, with Jemison assuming the role of leader, a position that led to crosses being burned on his front lawn. Mass meetings overflowed Jemison’s 1000-seat church as the community organized a system of car pools to offer an alternative to riding the buses.

           The boycott lasted eight days before white city leaders offered a compromise in which the two front seats would be reserved for whites and the two back seats for blacks with all other seats open on a first-come, first-served basis. Though the victory was only partial, the impact of the boycott spread throughout the South, providing a model for similar actions. When Martin Luther King Jr. assumed leadership of the Montgomery boycott, he consulted closely with Jemison, especially seeking advice on how to organize a large-scale car pool. 

           In early 1960, McCain was a freshman at the all-black North Carolina A and T College in Greensboro when he and three other students walked into the downtown Woolworth’s, bought school supplies, and then sat at the segregated lunch counter and asked for coffee and donuts. While Woolworth’s welcomed black spending throughout the store, the lunch counter would not serve African Americans. When refused service, the four young men remained at the counter for a half hour.

As McCain, who died January 9, explained, the action grew spontaneously out of dorm-room discussions between the students. “Four guys met, planned and went in to action. It’s just that simple.”

But the impact, both personal and political, was anything but simple. As he would remember, “If it’s possible to know what it means to have your soul cleansed—I felt pretty clean at that time. I probably felt better on that day than I’ve ever felt in my life.”

News of the sit-in spread throughout the A and T campus and over the next several days black students filled lunch counters at Woolworth’s and other Greensboro stores, refusing to leave until they were served. Out of this simple act grew a mass movement of sit-ins that swept the South.

Within less than a year, sit-ins took place in more than 100 southern cities. Somewhere around 70,000 people, black and white, were involved in the demonstrations, with nearly 4,000 arrested for taking part.

The standard narrative of the civil rights movement begins with the Montgomery boycott and then typically focuses on the movement at a national level under the leadership of such major figures as King. But as the stories of Jemison and McCain reveal, the movement was much more complex than that. The Montgomery action, for instance, did not spring out of nowhere, but had important precedents, most notably the Baton Rouge boycott.

Moreover, while national in scope, the movement was also a collection of numerous local movements, each with its own specific issues, tactics and leadership. People within various local movements then shared strategies and experiences with activists in other locales who adapted them to their particular circumstances.

The bubbling up of activities in such places as Baton Rouge and Greensboro provided a constant renewal of the movement’s energy and dynamism. But it often caused fits for its own established leadership, leaving it as journalist Louis Lomax wrote in 1962, “in the position of the oddly-dressed man who said to a bystander, ‘Please tell me which way the parade went; after all, I’m leading it.’ ”